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The mobile phone is a major phenomenon in the developing world. In working with young people in Africa to help them build their own business plans (not those directed by international NGOs. There is shock when you say “No, I don’t say, you say, you know”), I have found it cheaper to call via Skype to Uganda (including during a meeting in a refugee community in northern Uganda attended by police where some gangs were threatening to lynch my mentee, not least because they attached supernatural evil to Fred’s contacts with the outside world, believing he got his funds from the murder of his sister for sale of organs) Fred Obala)
– cheaper than to call an Australian mobile via Skype or from a home phone.

Also working with others like this community – . The web site out of date, it’s not easy to maintain a site for a place without infrastructure, but build a presence and encouraging local people to believe they can use their own minds is in the same class of power shifting as that medical use of phones. The funding and support has shifted, on the basis of enabling presence on the web, in one case to an NGO in Holland, in the other to an architecture masters student in Canada who is planning a school building using local resources.
Another such ‘web-presence establishing’ site of mine, for a rape crisis and training centre in the Dr Congo, has now folded, but it got Victoria Bentley from her trauma counselling in daytime soap land in California into her amazing work in the eastern DRC now.

I have great faith in micro level targeted efforts, including personal initiatives, via the UN online volunteers site or wherever, to begin processes which lead in unexpected directions but give people, for generations subject to various fierce direction, more command of their lives. As in indigenous, intervened-in, remote Australia, as well as the rest of our country, health begins with control over one’s life and a sense of purpose.